We are here to provide an independent, rather skeptical view of events at Marquette University. Comments are enabled on most posts, but extended comments are welcome and can be e-mailed to jmcadams2@juno.com. E-mailed comments will be treated like Letters to the Editor.
This site has no official connection with Marquette University. Indeed, when University officials find out about it, they will doubtless want it shut down.

Friday, September 25, 2015

The Campus “Hate Crime” that Wasn’t a Hate Crime

On Monday, Townhall’s news editor, Katie Pavlich, went to the University of Delaware to give a speech about the Second Amendment. University of Delaware’s student group–Students for the Second Amendment–had invited Pavlich to speak about the issue, which was open to the public at the cost of three dollars. Yet, Pavlich criticized the Black Lives Matter (BLM) for their atrocious “pigs in a blanket” chant - and the overall movement - as one that promotes violence against police officers. Well, surprise; that didn’t bode over well with some folks on the left and a protest was organized during her visit to U-Del.

There was a heavy security presence at the event, and it ended without any major incidents. Yet, reports of nooses being hung in some trees on campus one day after Pavlich gave her speech got everyone freaking out about hate crimes. There was only one problem: these weren’t nooses, thus no hate crime:

University of Delaware police say what was originally believed to be “nooses” hanging from a tree on campus were actually leftover lantern decorations.

Officials say a hate crime investigation ended when it was determined the items were paper lantern decorations leftover from an event that was held on campus on September 16.

The items that were left in the tree were part of a decoration from a paper lantern that was used during an event held on The Green that was a UD-sanctioned event,” University of Delaware Police Chief Patrick Ogden said Wednesday morning.

It was determined that the paper lantern decorations were removed from the tree, but the strings were never taken down, leading to them being mistaken for nooses.

Can we at least agree that we should be happy that these aren’t nooses? Could we come to that consensus? Of course, if such an incident had occurred, it does deserve the wrath of disgust and anger over what is a blatantly racist act. This incident didn’t carry any of that–and having some un-serious discussion about events that are the figments of some people’s imagination isn’t helping anyone, it’s enabling one’s disconnect with reality.

Campus bureaucrats can’t resist pandering to racial (and gender and sexual) grievance mongers, and it doesn’t seem to matter at all if the people claiming a grievance are entirely out to lunch.

Typically, these folks need to be scolded rather than pandered to. In this case, Targett needs to be asking “why did you say that wire hangers were nooses when they didn’t look at all like that. What were you thinking?”

“I believe very strongly that we are not going to have processes like this again, especially when it comes to issues of how this campus handles diversity and inclusion,” Welburn said. “Whatever we do moving forward, we have to think about women, women of color, African-American women specifically because of this incident. We have to think about the damage.”

What Welburn should have asked the students was “Did you really think it was a good idea to honor a terrorist and a cop killer? Why in the world did you want that?”

But campus bureaucrats can’t possibly imagine that the grievance mongers might need to be confronted, challenged to defend their ideas, and learn that lots of people out in the real world don’t agree with them.

The coddling of the activists is simply a failure to educate.

Nooses? Here are the “nooses.” What sort of people could see a hate crime here?

2 Comments:

We had something similar here in CT regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. A frequent contributor to the Wesleyan University Argus newspaper wrote a column about the BLM movement. People took offense and sent a petition demanding that the paper be defunded. Fortunately, the chancellor, president and provost marshal said that free speech is simply that, free speech. I should also note that newspaper editors said the polar opposite to what the administration said.

The writer in question is a 30 year old freshman who served two tours of duty in Iraq & Afghanistan and actually was threaten with violence over what he had written.